Via a Buddhist group at Harvard, I just saw an interesting article from Singapore in 2007, about the tooth relic located in a Singapore temple. For those who are unfamiliar, Buddhists (especially Theravādins) often venerate items said to have come from the Buddha’s body – his hair, nails, teeth. They are housed in stūpas, the tall, pointy and/or circular towers typically located in Buddhist temple grounds.

To a Western audience, at least, this phenomenon provokes an obvious question: did these relics actually come from the Buddha’s body? And in many cases – certainly the case of this Singapore temple – any serious empirical investigation can establish the answer as a pretty clear no. Continue reading →

In the past few years I’ve become involved in live-action role-playing (usually known by the acronym LARP, or “LARPing”): a cross between long-form improv theatre and tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This hobby is often maligned, partially because it looks very strange to those not involved (especially on video), and partially because of its association with the kind of intelligent but socially awkward “geeky” subcultures that develop around Star Trek, comic books, collectible card games, Japanese animation and the like. But as I’ve been a part of those subcultures all my life, this is hardly a barrier to my participation. (I hope you didn’t expect that someone who blogs about Sanskrit philosophical texts was one of the popular kids in high school.)

LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. Continue reading →

Having decided on marriage, my fiancée and I are now well immersed in the process of planning our wedding. And like many young couples, we feel a strong distaste for what we have come to call the wedding-industrial complex: the North American industry that makes a lucrative profit from telling couples what they must do and selling it to them, documented in Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day. And then too often, we have then wound up going through a process uncomfortably familiar to many couples in our situation: observing traditions you despise, deciding you’ll do it all differently, and then finding yourself going through the traditional process anyway. Susan Jane Gilman expressed it perfectly in her article (and then book) Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. She and her fiancé decided that they hated the expense, pomp and sexism of a traditional wedding, and so theirs would be different. They’d just leave it as a fun party: hire a DJ, a bartender and an ice cream truck. But:

Somehow, Bob and I had also overlooked the fact that even if all you wanted was an ice cream truck, a bartender, and a deejay, you still needed a place to put them. And if you decided it might be nice to have some photographs of the day — photographs that did not scalp anyone, or feature detailed close-ups of your uncle’s thumb — it was best to hire a photographer. And then, as my mother diplomatically pointed out, if relatives were going to travel across the country to witness your marriage, it was probably polite to feed them more than a Fudgsicle and a glass of champagne. And surely, you couldn’t expect older folks to balance a plate on their hand all night: they had to sit somewhere. And since you were going to have tables anyway, would it really kill you to put out a few flowers to brighten things up?

Eventually Gilman even accepts the pouffy white wedding dress of her essay’s title: “My mind might have been that of a twenty-first-century feminist, but my body was that of a nineteenth-century Victorian, and the dress seemed to have been custom-made for my proportions.” And so it begins: Continue reading →

[UPDATE: This has become my most frequently read blog post of all. I’m guessing that’s because a large number of undergraduate students come here wondering what Body Ritual among the Nacirema means. If that’s you, welcome! I would just ask two things of you: first, please do read Body Ritual and try to figure it out for yourself first before reading this post, and second, once you have read the post below, don’t spoil it for everyone else.]

One of the most important anthropological studies to be conducted in the past century is Horace Miner’s (very short) 1956 classic Body Ritual among the Nacirema. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to follow the link now and examine Miner’s penetrating insights into one of the most unusual cultural groups yet to be studied by ethnographers. Please do read the essay before you read the rest of this blog post, as the post won’t be very helpful without it. Continue reading →

Great article by Ethan Watters in the New York Times last Friday, called The Americanization of Mental Illness, which deals with questions at the heart of cross-cultural philosophy. (Watters also has a book on the subject coming out, and a blog.) The article notes how “mental illness” remains a category far more culture-bound than psychological studies are typically willing to admit. The DSM, American psychologists’ scripture, has a seven-page appendix (pp. 897-903 in the DSM-IV-TR edition) for “culture-bound disorders,” such as amok (a condition in Malaysia where men get violently aggressive and then have amnesia) or pibloktoq (an Inuit condition involving a short burst of extreme excitement followed by seizures and coma). It’s telling that few of the disorders in this section are culture-bound to the United States; and those which are, are quite telling: “ghost sickness” is “frequently observed among members of many American Indian tribes”; locura, nervios and susto are found among Latinos; sangue dormido is found among Cape Verde Islanders and their immigrants to the US; “rootwork” and “spell” are “seen among African Americans and European Americans from the southern United States.” That is, the only “culture-bound disorders” to be found among white Americans are found among those weird Southern hillbillies who live beside black people. Normal white Americans, the kind who live in Cambridge, MA or in Manhattan, don’t get “culture-bound disorders.” Their disorders are just part of the universal human condition.Continue reading →

Every year around this time, the United States is subject to increasingly acrimonious “Christmas wars,” over whether the time of year should be called Christmas as it used to be, or a more generic “holidays.” Canada has not escaped these battles, but they seem to be a much smaller issue there, which I think is a very good thing.

Many people in the United States, of course, do not celebrate Christmas. Most often, such people are Jews, and perhaps sometimes Muslims and followers of Asian traditions. It is the rare atheist or agnostic who refuses to celebrate Christmas – a fact I find somewhat telling. In my own Canadian childhood I found that refusal somewhat bizarre. My family never went to church, my parents never believed or taught any ideas they recognized as Christian; but we nevertheless celebrated Christmas, as North Americans in North America, and nobody thought that was weird. When we went to India we always celebrated Diwali and Holi without thinking of ourselves as Hindus, and nobody seemed to think that was weird either.

The first people to challenge my non-Christian celebration of Christmas were Jewish friends during my undergrad days at McGill. Continue reading →

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